Not sure if you ever watched this short lived TV series about a writer (Anne Heche) from New York who starts a new life in a small town in Alaska as a radio talk show host.    If you have watched this show (chances maybe slim if you are not a woman), then you know what Coyhaique feels and looks like. 

Coyhaique is a city of 50,000 in northern Patagonia about 2 hours flight from Santiago, and the headquarters of the company we are working for.  Jonathan and I are in Coyhaique, working out of this “office” for the next 2 weeks.  Truthfully, it feels more like a ski-lodge than an office. Everyone here is in their 30’s and extremely friendly.   The business dress code includes jeans, fleece jackets and full beards.  There is no such thing as central heating in Coyhaique, so we depend on firewood heaters to keep us warm.  This also goes for the log cabin Jonathan and I are living in during our stay.  Don’t worry mom, there are many safety features to ensure we don’t burn our house down while sleeping.  Everywhere we go, we feel extremely small in comparison to the soaring mountains and trees and the vastness of the sky. 

On our first day we were introduced to “mate” (mah-tee), by Armando, the extreme rock climbing architect and Sebastian, the sailing nature conservationist who kind of looks like Jack Sparrow.   Mate is a sort of Patagonian tea,  a green woody mulch steeped in hot water which is sipped through a special metal pipe/straw .  One person drinks it, and more hot water is poured over it and the next person drinks it through the same straw and it passes on and so forth.  I was fortunate to have the first “flush”. 

Armando comments that North Americans don’t like to share straws and proceeds to tell me a story about how one time an American came down and was drinking out of a water bottle.  Armando was very thirsty at one point and asked the American for a sip of water.  The man hesitated and looked uncomfortable and said something about “not knowing if it was a good idea..”.  Armando felt bad right away because he had disrespected the man’s American culture.

I felt embarrassed about his story and how it reflected our super paranoia and extreme levels of personal space.  And then I thought maybe I should have been the last person to drink the matte to show Armando that many North Americans are happy to share drinks with others.  Just as long as they don’t have icky super bug germs.

-joyce